Manchester United Ruined My Life

Colin Shindler was dealt a cruel hand by Fate when he became a passionate Manchester City supporter. In this brilliant sporting autobiography he recalls the great characters of his youth, like his eccentric Uncle Laurence, as well as his professional heroes. Threaded through these sporting events is the author's own story, which touches on a universal nerve, growing up in a Jewish family, his childhodd destroyed by the sudden death of his mother and his slow emotional recovery through his love for Manchester City. It is a tale that reveals what it is like to be on the outside looking in, with his nose pressed up against the sweet shop window watching the United supporters take all the wine gums.

Colin Shindler was dealt a cruel hand by Fate when he became a passionate Manchester City supporter. In this brilliant sporting autobiography he recalls the great characters of his youth, like his eccentric Uncle Laurence, as well as his professional heroes. Threaded through these sporting events is the author's own story, which touches on a universal nerve, growing up in a Jewish family, his childhodd destroyed by the sudden death of his mother and his slow emotional recovery through his love for Manchester City. It is a tale that reveals what it is like to be on the outside looking in, with his nose pressed up against the sweet shop window watching the United supporters take all the wine gums.

Colin Shindler has previously written of his deep love for Manchester City in the bestselling Manchester United Ruined My Life and three other previous books. Now he tells the story of his sorrowful disenchantment with his home town club as, on the instruction of its new foreign owners, it turns itself remorselessly into a global brand. Trophyless since 1976, in 2011 Manchester City won the FA Cup and set off on their quest for the Premiership and the Champions League. In their zeal to win every competition the new Manchester City has spent money with wild abandon, signing outstandingly talented players as well as a few ordinary ones but in almost every case at hugely inflated prices. From the nail-biting win over Gillingham in the League Two Play Off final at Wembley in 1999 to the climax of the 2011 season, Shindler watches his team get steadily more successful and, to his own bewilderment, feels steadily more alienated from it. This is the story of a frustrated romantic who finds in the glitz and glamour of the current media-obsessed game a helter-skelter of artificially fabricated excitement. As he details how football courses through his veins Shindler tells how it intersects with his own life, a life that has been marked by family tragedy, and how he finally found personal redemption even as his team lost its soul.

Manchester United Ruined My Wife, the hilarious tale of a life-long United supporter and the way his obsession affected his wife and daughters, one of whom grew up to be an international pop star, was first published in 2004 selling over 10,000 copies. This new, updated edition brings the tale from the tragedy of Munich up to the triumph of Moscow, including the protracted sale to American owners, the rise and rise of FC United of Manchester and finally the double whammy of United's 17th league title and the agony and ecstasy of Russian penalty roulette in Moscow. How can a man love one woman, when he is in love with eleven men? When people get married it is "Till death do us part," yet, for almost 40% of the population, marriage ends in divorce. But, when you fall truly, madly, deeply in love with your football team there is no divorce; you do not stray. Your team is the one constant, consistent, permanent, overwhelming obsession in your life. Rarely has a book been written that so painfully yet humorously conveys the all-consuming red-hot passion, joy and despair felt by the vast majority of football fans. With highs so intense it reduces sex to mere skin rubbing, David Blatt puts wives in their rightful place on the substitutes bench as he takes the reader on a journey through his United-watching adventures, from the Busby Babes via the 1968 European Cup final, relegation, promotion, the wilderness years of the 70s and 80s, a first Championship in 26 years and the glorious 1999 treble, which culminated in the unforgettable Champions League triumph in Barcelona. It is a tale that millions of so-called "ordinary" football fans can relate to. After all, how can kissing girls compete with getting up at 5am for a 400 mile round trip for home games?

Alan Watts introduced millions of Western readers to Zen and other Eastern philosophies. But he is also recognized as a brilliant commentator on Judeo-Christian traditions, as well as a celebrity philosopher who exemplified the ideas — and lifestyle — of the 1960s counterculture. In this compilation of controversial lectures that Watts delivered at American universities throughout the sixties, he challenges readers to reevaluate Western culture's most hallowed constructs. Watts treads the familiar ground of interpreting Eastern traditions, but he also covers new territory, exploring the counterculture's basis in the ancient tribal and shamanic cultures of Asia, Siberia, and the Americas. In the process, he addresses some of the era's most important questions: What is the nature of reality? How does an individual's relationship to society affect this reality? Filled with Watts's playful, provocative style, the talks show the remarkable scope of a philosopher at his prime, exploring and defining the sixties counterculture as only Alan Watts could.

Cricket, England's gentle summer game, was shaken to its core by demonstrations, strikes, arrests and violence amid growing global disgust at apartheid, ahead of South Africa's planned 1970 tour. One of sport's leading social historians tells the astonishing story of a cricket tour framed in a landscape of turbulent social history.

Ali Smith's masterful, ambitious Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and most ambitious book to date, the brilliant young Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe . . . 'Ali Smith has got style, ideas and punch. Read her' Jeanette Winterson 'An extremely readable, easy-flowing writer and one of the subtlest and most intelligent around. Hotel World is essential reading from a writer confirming herself as a major talent. . . a wonderful piece of sustained imagination' Independent 'As infectious as a pop song, the story bursts open form the very first page and demands to be read in one sitting' The Times

They have names like Barmy Bernie, Daft Donald, and Steamin' Sammy. They like lager (in huge quantities), the Queen, football clubs (especially Manchester United), and themselves. Their dislike encompasses the rest of the known universe, and England's soccer thugs express it in ways that range from mere vandalism to riots that terrorize entire cities. Now Bill Buford, editor of the prestigious journal Granta, enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure with the social imagination of a George Orwell and the raw personal engagement of a Hunter Thompson.